The Skills: From First Job to Dream Job - What Every Woman Needs to Know. Mishal Husain
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for the seventeen years up until 2017, girls in Britain had outperformed boys in getting the highest A level grades in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.26 I also can’t shake off the suspicion that there is something in particular going on at these two universities, because in UK higher education as a whole, the same proportion of women as men gain first-class degrees.27 I certainly remember times when I found my weekly supervisions at Cambridge intimidating. It wasn’t that the academics leading them set out to make them so, but there is a weight that comes with the history, tradition and reputation of excellence that surrounds you in these places. The Times journalist Sathnam Sanghera, who was born into a working-class Sikh family and went on to read English at Cambridge, remembers ‘negative feelings of unbelonging’ while he was there.28 If academic self-concept is the key, how much might it be affected in people who have a nagging sense that they don’t quite fit or fully deserve to be in such a celebrated place?
Other thought-provoking evidence on socialisation and confidence-building has emerged from a different university environment. Researchers Sarah Eddy and Daniel Grunspan were interested in how peer perception and gender influence students’ assessments of each other’s mastery of a particular subject – in this case biology. They asked students to complete surveys, getting them to highlight those they felt were particularly strong in their grasp of the material studied and those they thought would do well on the course.
The researchers found that male students were much more likely to rate other men as knowledgeable, a tendency that lasted throughout the academic year and persisted even after controlling for class performance and outspokenness. Female students showed no gender bias, nominating both fellow female and male students. The authors also found that there were some students who stood out in the eyes of their peers and were nominated multiple times, and that these students were always male. It wasn’t as though there weren’t women with similarly high grades in their classes, who also spoke up frequently and demonstrated their knowledge, but somehow they never gained the same ‘celebrity status’ as their male counterparts.29
When I read this study I started to imagine what the scene in the classroom might have looked like. The ‘celebrity’ students would no doubt have been aware of attracting their peers’ attention when they spoke – heads would have turned to listen to them, perhaps nodding in agreement. It’s a good experience to have, one that’s certain to make you feel more at ease, happier with your command of the subject material and probably spurred on to make further points. Could these apparently small interactions build up and develop capacity in a subject so much so that attainment is higher – or the chances of further study or a career in the field are increased? I started to think more and more about expectations of behaviour – whether in a classroom, smaller tutorial-style gatherings of students, or the first day in a new job. If we grow up with assumptions, even ones of which we are barely conscious, that men will speak first or take the lead, that can easily turn into a pattern that validates and reinforces those assumptions.
Consider this alongside what we already know about what can happen in the workplace or before people even get there. One meta-analysis of studies conducted in OECD countries over a twenty-five-year period found that discrimination against ethnic minority applicants in the hiring process was commonplace.30 In 2009, a major study commissioned by a UK government department reported high levels of name-based discrimination when researchers sent out multiple applications for real-life openings. The main difference between the applications was the likely ethnicity associated with their name: ‘Andrew Clarke’ was used to denote a white British male; ‘Mariam Namagembe’ for a black African female and ‘Nazia Mahmood’ for a Pakistani or Bangladeshi female. White names were favoured over equivalent applications from ethnic minority candidates.31
More recently, the power of big data has been harnessed to take a broader snapshot of the workplace and analyse it in terms of promotion rather than recruitment. The US-based neuroscientist and artificial intelligence expert Vivienne Ming took a vast data set of millions of real-life professional profiles collected by a tech recruitment firm and used them to compare the career trajectories of software developers whose first names were either ‘Joe’ or ‘Jose’. She found that those named ‘Jose’ typically needed a Master’s degree or more to be equally likely to get a promotion as a ‘Joe’ who had no degree. She called this a ‘tax on being different’, because of the extra costs and time involved in gaining the higher qualifications.
When Ming then used her model to compare the profiles of software engineers with male names against those with female names, she also found a ‘tax’. Typically, women needed a Master’s degree in order to compete with a man with a Bachelor’s degree. No wonder people who face these extra hurdles sometimes decide it’s not worth pursuing a particular path, she concluded: ‘The tax comes from the cost of studying at more prestigious universities, on more and higher degrees, in increases in minimum experience, and more exceptional professional backgrounds.’ In the face of this, any decision to drop out is rational, reflecting ‘a cost almost entirely absent from their more privileged peers’.32
Having invested in recruitment and development, few companies or organisations would want to see good staff reach a conclusion like that, disappearing from career tracks they had embarked upon. When that happens, both the individual and the employer generally lose out, with evidence of wider economic impact too. Yet without a forensic approach to achieving progress and change, where we are now could easily be where we stall.
The best hope of avoiding that is probably to be as laser-like as possible about identifying where the pressure points arise and why. What is it that deters or derails people with potential, who have much to give, and what might just keep them in the game or at least reaching the next milestone? Data and new analytical tools should help provide the evidence and illustrate patterns beyond the individual experience. Only with that degree of clear-sighted focus are we likely to get to better solutions for the twenty-first-century workplace.
We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
What do we see and hear, growing up as girls, that might have a lasting impact on our sense of self? I remember frequently being asked what I wanted to become, but a few years ago I realised that when it came to conversations with the young daughters of friends, I was doing something quite different. Too often, that conversation would begin with a comment on their appearance – something that seemed innocuous enough at the time but also unlikely to be said to boys. It started to bother me. If it would be odd for my sons’ hair or clothes to be the source of comment when they were introduced to another adult, why was I doing that when it came to their female peers?
We send messages about behaviour, too – expecting girls to be polite and well-behaved while making a fuss of boys when they are. And girls notice. Girlguiding UK, which carries out an annual survey of opinion among nearly two thousand girls and young women, aged from seven to twenty-one, said the overwhelming message from its 2017 results was the entrenchment of gender stereotypes in all aspects of life: ‘From a young age, girls sense they face different expectations compared to boys and feel a pressure to adjust their behaviour accordingly. Girls encounter stereotyping across their lives – at school, in the media and in advertising, in the real and the virtual world, from their peers, teachers and families.’ Among the seven- to ten-year-olds questioned more than half said gender stereotypes would affect them saying what they thought and how much they participated in class.1
One group of US researchers has suggested that six is a key age at which impressions about the different potential of boys and girls